I am a painter. It is the material nature of paint and its associated unguents that draw me in – the viscosity, the thickness, the smell, the stickiness, the sensuousness, the mess. Painting is a conversation I have with myself, seeking to find answers through the very act of painting itself.

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For me, the most interesting thing about painting is not actually ‘The Painting’; it is what happens to the painter and as she paints.  The paint as material, and the painter as subject, in turn are transformed by the process.  As the painter immerses and releases herself to this accretive process, I am interested in the ways she seeks to harness the transubstantive moment when painting becomes Painting, where activity translates to object.

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My thesis, “Locating a Space of Exchange: re-imagining the liminal in contemporary painting practice”, argues for the primacy of process over object within painting. I seek to articulate the (in)visible pathways within process that lead painter and painting to a point of being, a metaphysical plane where painting ‘becomes’.

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When we look at painting, we stand back, making space between ourselves and the artwork. We look at the surface of the paint, the marks made. We absorb the re/presented atmosphere – but we are always “outside” of painting. My research documents a highly personnel journey through my own process and practice. Unlike the spectatorial gallery viewing, this investigation is nurtured in the “inner” world of painting … and we view that journey together from the inside, out.

Re-imagining the liminal within painting practice? I argue the importance of recognising that the liminal in this context is not simply regarded as a theory, but that the liminal is also both method and a tangible space of praxis. These are fragile threads of my research that become indexically interwoven into the very fabric of making – providing structure, shape, and purpose to the theoretical.

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The outcome of this epistemic journey will be the delineation of conceptual space of fluidity within painting that can challenge established interpretations of what painting is, what painting isn’t, and what it could be. I seek to find these answers through the process of painting itself; painting is the research.

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“artistic research cannot be comprised in well-defined modules, structured units and other limiting concepts. Artistic thinking as a form of pure rhizomatic thought separates artistic research from arborescent and sedentary conceptions of knowledge, from judgemental positions functioning as nodal points of academic science and replaces it with a fluent, nomadic, deterritorialising movement.”

(Henk Slager, The Pleasure of Research.)

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The essence of the studio, and all that it represents, resides within.

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I am backstage.

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I am a painter.

I am a painter who does not paint paintings.

I am a painter researching messy processes and messier thinking, materialness, performativity and language through the act of painting, and not painting.

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I am a painter in/between. I am embedded within the interstices existing and emerging between painting/painter/Painting.

I am a painter seeking extra-painterly explanations.

And if there are none?

Then I am no longer a painter.